On Valentine’s Day, 2018 an eighteen year old man entered Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL armed with military-style weapons and opened fire on students and faculty. By the time he surrendered to police, he had killed 17 people, injuring others. The shooting put the issue of gun control back in focus. Over the past 12 months, other prominent shootings, such as the one in December 2017 that killed 26 people in a Texas church, and the September 2017 one in Las Vegas that fell 56 people, had re-ignited the same debate to little effect.
This prompted us to ask: is there a relationship between the public’s response to mass shootings and gun control attitudes? And if so, what is it? Specifically, does the fear of victimization prompted by such events make people more attracted to the message of the National Rifle Association (NRA) that guns provide more safety and thus gun control is counter-productive, or does it increase support for gun control?
The answer to this question, presented in our new study , draws on theories of how emotions and specifically anxiety influence Americans’ political decision-making. CONT.
Alexandra Filindra (U. of Illinois at Chicago) & Loren Collingwood (UC Riverside), LSE USAPP